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Folksonomy

Define​

A system of user-defined content classification, where content Is tagged' with phrases they feel reflect the subject

Folksonomy is a system of content classification where users attach tags containing words or phrases they feel are most relevant to a specific piece of content. Similar to (and sometimes referred to as) social tagging, they aid navigation outside of a traditional taxonomy system, where site owners classify content within a rigid framework. User generated folksonomies can be used alongside taxonomy to give users greater freedom in navigation.

The term ‘Folksonomy’ was created by Thomas Vander Wal in 2004 to describe the way websites were giving users the freedom to decide what a page’s content was about. Flickr is an early advocate of this system. Flickr allows users to tag words they felt best described the images they were uploading. If any user wants to see all images tagged with a specific word (or phrase), they could click on it to reveal all images associated with it across all of Flickr. This way, image uploads aren’t constrained by a site owner’s taxonomy that may not be relevant to their content. Visitors have the freedom to navigate through user-generated content classification.

A folksonomy gives rise to collective intelligence. But, as it’s publicly sourced, the system can be open to abuse. Tag clouds are a common visualisation of folksonomy, with the most used phrases appearing more prominently than others. This sort of functionality can be found most regularly on blogs or news sites, where a large amount of content can create patterns in phrase popularity.

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